Station Has Seen Last Train but Not Last Chance

Published: October 14, 1992

BUFFALO, Oct. 13—
Soaring 271 feet above the wood-frame houses and church steeples of Buffalo's East Side, Central Terminal was once an Art Deco beacon visible for 15 miles. Today it is a dark and crumbling monument to better times.

The last passenger train departed 13 years ago this month. Since then the building has deteriorated despite plans to transform it into apartments, stores or even a giant wedding hall.

Recently, momentum has grown to save the building whose concourse was big enough to seat 2,200 people for dinner when it was dedicated in 1929. Last Sunday a far smaller crowd, fewer than 100 people, turned out to discuss the issue at the Polish Community Center, several blocks from the old station.

Bernice Lasota Muszynski, who remembered going to the terminal as a teen-ager in the years just before World War II, said: "We'd go to the cafeteria and have Danish. We used to buy little trinkets in the shops." 'It Was Massive, Beautiful'

She kissed her fiance goodbye at the terminal in 1941 when he shipped out for an Army artillery unit in Europe. She returned there three years later to welcome him back.

"It was massive, beautiful," she recalled. "The ceilings were so tall. And it was very busy. It was always busy. It was open 24 hours a day."

Completed in 1929, the station mirrored the city's mood, said Susan A. McCartney, president of the Preservation Coalition of Erie County. "It's an almost egotistical, 'we're the best' kind of imagery," she said. "There are cities now that even with the recession feel like they walk on water. Buffalo felt that way."

Central Terminal's bronze doors are gone. In the restaurant, which had a W-shaped black-glass counter, nothing but rubble remains. The concourse is strewn with broken glass and masonry. The buffalo statue that people once used as a meeting point lies smashed alongside a gutted cigar stand. Above it, lettering on a cracked marble panel reads, "To Trains." Trains Just Pass It By

In 1929 the station handled 200 trains a day. Today, the few passenger trains that run between New York City and Chicago pass the old terminal slowly, stopping at a squat suburban station where the seats are plastic and the food comes from vending machines.

"This is what this country does to its landmarks," City Councilman David A. Franczyk said after climbing through a hole in a door to tour the old terminal last week.

Mr. Franczyk is too young to remember the golden age of railroads. But he shares with many people here a sad sense of what the station meant to their city and what its current condition implies. "It's sort of like a vestige of America's industrial past, a glorious past," he said. "Back then they had vision, they had idealism."

Buffalo is by no means the first city to look at an old rail station and see both past and future. In Washington, in Cincinnati, in Indianapolis, in St. Louis, stations have found new life as museums, as homes for stores, restaurants, and hotels, and even as transportation centers again. A City in Decline

In Buffalo, the decline of the terminal closely mirrors that of the city itself. The city's population, 525,000 and growing when Central Terminal opened, is down to 328,000.

The New York Central Railroad built Central Terminal for $14 million. Its corporate descendant sold the building in 1979 to Anthony T. Fedele, a local builder, for $75,000.

Mr. Fedele planned a 150-room hotel, offices and restaurants, but he could not find investors. The Polish Community Center held some dances at the terminal and the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, but little else happened. Mr. Fedele fell behind on taxes, and the city put the building up for auction in 1986. Thomas Telesco bought Central Terminal for $100,000, and talked about turning it into a banquet hall and using it as a station on a proposed high-speed rail line linking New York and Toronto.

Now the terminal is at the center of a legal battle between Mr. Telesco and two developers who are trying to buy the building. Bernard Tuchman said he and his uncle, Samuel Tuchman, have paid Mr. Telesco $350,000 of a total $1.3 million in a purchase-option arrangement for the building. Mr. Tuchman said, however, that over the last two years Mr. Telesco has violated the agreement by selling the building's interior fixtures. Expecting to Win Title

Mr. Telesco could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, John L. Martin, did not return calls.

The Tuchmans' lawyer, Gregory L. Davis, said he expected his clients to win title to the building within the next three months. What then?

The Tuchmans want to put apartments, offices and stores into the terminal, but they need investors. Bernard Tuchman said the estimated cost was $81 million four years ago.

The City Council in July created a citizens' panel to make recommendations on the terminal. Mr. Franczyk conceded that the cash-strapped city is in no position to pay for restoration, but he said Buffalo must find some way to help save the building.

"We've got to show that we haven't lost our vision," he said. "We have to fight for something like this. It's important to Buffalo. The decline has got to stop."

Photos: "We have to fight for something like this," said David A. Franczyk, a City Councilman in Buffalo, standing in Central Terminal.; A portion of the decaying terminal building. (Photographs by Mickey Osterreicher for The New York Times)